Just a Thought...

Starting in July, I’m starting a new project to help sharpen my skills and maintain a consistent production. The basic principles are as follows:

• Every month I take a new picture
• That picture is then manipulated and prepared to the best of my ability
• The final result is a matted print

The goals are to fine tune my process, try new techniques, and increase my proficiency. The reason for dealing with a print is is for the work to reach its full potential.

Why every month, and not every week or every day? Mainly because I want to have an attainable goal. Something that is reasonable for me to do, yet will push me. Due to my schedule between work and church, I have far less time than I really want in the darkroom. I’m trying to make better use of my time in the darkroom. Additionally, the goal of one print a month allows me to really dig deep into a print and experiment with ways to make it better through dodging, burning, toning, or more creative approaches.

In the process of trying to coerce a working system in my darkroom, I purchased the book “Beyond the Zone System” because I know it has a lot to help understand sensitometry. What appeals to me is the ability to both test the speed of your film and the development time within 6 sheets. Since Ansel Adam’s film speed test takes seven sheets and an unknown amount of sheets for the dev test (at least one but in practice a few more), I’m all about conserving resources. The cost of the sheet of film is only one part of the cost—it’s the investment in time that I’m most concerned about.

BTZS starts out with a nice little overview of how paper and film work together to make the finished image. It also has a review of all the types of math and graphing theory that pertains to this testing process. The math’s not that hard, but the problem is in the way it’s presented. You can tell the author has a wealth of information, and he tries to make it accessible all in one or two chapters, but you almost end in confusion.

Where my head really starts swimming is when he gets in to calculating film speed. With Ansel Adams, it’s simply a density of 0.1 over film base+fog. The author covers the history and the pros and cons of how film speed was calculated over time, instead of just choosing one and teach how to do that one. It’s useful information, but the alternatives could be moved to an appendix to make that section more accessible.

With a proper handle of the basics of how the film and paper relate to each other, you can intelligently make decisions on exposure, development, and printing decisions. The road to understanding taken in the BTZS approach is very technical, which is not for the feint of heart. However, once you’ve learned the basics, you learn useful bits of information. For example, changing development times is similar to changing apertures—they both follow the same geometric progression of numbers (4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16…) to produce the same changes in final density. Shutter speed times and film speed numbers follow the same progression of numbers.

If you are serious about understanding more about how your materials work and respond to light, this book is definitely something you should have in your library. It will take time to “get it”, but once you do it will help you with your final results. You have a better understanding of why you choose a particular density for your print materials. You also have a better understanding of how zones don’t equal stops of exposure—yet the two still relate predictably.

I’ve been going through Jeff Curto’s History of Photography podcast which has been very good and educational. Not surprising since this is Mr. Curto’s lectures from the class he teaches at the College of DuPage. I did get out of it what I wanted, which was exposure to history’s famous photographers. However, there is one thing I can’t wrap my head around; which is not Mr. Curto’s fault. It’s this whole thing with concept art. The music world has an equivalent called “performance art”. I don’t think it’s so much that I don’t get it, but more that I don’t want to get it.

To me, concept art or performance art is what happens when your left brain attempts to do the job that belongs to the right brain. In essence you as the viewer or artist are supposed to thrust your own intellectual ideas on the object of art rather than allow the art to speak for itself. In essence, it seems to me like the mental masturbations of someone pretending to be an artist telling the world that this boring or non-existent thing is art. For example, someone sits at a piano for 30 seconds in an outdoor setting, closes the piano and takes a bow. Someone erases another person’s painting and calls it art. It takes no skill to do these things. You are supposed to contemplate the ingenious mastery of perception or some other such nonsense.

Sure I come to art with a preconceived notion that art is supposed to be beautiful. I can get abstract art. Art is always introduced by folks like Michelangelo, DaVinci, etc. We then learn about impressionism such as the wonderful works of art by a Claude Monet. I can even get Picasso. So when I see photographic art in the same style I can wrap my head around it. I can understand it. I can see the beauty in the subject, even if I may not particularly enjoy the subject.

What I don’t get is how something that looks amateurish is supposed to be a modern interpretation of art. It almost seems to me as if the art community has become so inbred on its own philosophies and community that it has lost touch with the world. The people who buy these pieces of “art” don’t do it because they enjoy what it looks like, but rather because they look at it as an investment. I have to wonder if the concept art will truly be remembered a hundred years from now?

Do I consider myself an artist? Hardly. Sure I am pursuing photographic art, but I don’t count myself to arrived. In many ways, I want the art to challenge me and impress me. Not to challenge my understanding, but to challenge my skill and knowing what is possible with the medium. I’m forced to deal with left brain functions all day with my job, when I view art I want to exercise the other half of my brain. Concept art (and in the same vein performance art) fails to challenge me or impress me. My daughter created better work when she was nine.

I’ve been having mixed results in the darkroom, so I’m in the process of at the very least improving my consistency. Part of that process is testing my film and development time for what I like to shoot. It hurts my feelings to use so much precious 4×5 film for the purpose—but I’ve learned something. My instinct to shoot at half the rated speed for my Fomapan (or Arista.EDU Ultra) film was right on the money. However, the development times for Rodinal 1:50 I got from Digital Truth are way off for the way I develop. When I tray develop, I am constantly agitating and rocking the tray back and forth. As a result I have way more contrast than I should.

How do I know? Well I do have an X-Rite 810 densitometer, which can be found on ebay for a reasonable cost. I don’t plan to use it all the time, but while I’m getting my process under control it’s becoming quite valuable. I found the minimum exposure that produced .1 over film base+fog which gave me an ISO of 100 for the Fomapan Creative 200 film. Great. Now, I’m trying to find the right development time that will give me a density between 1.25 and 1.35 for a Zone VIII exposure. The first time through I accidentally made the exposure for Zone VII (that’s zone 7 instead of 8), and used the recommended 10 minute development time for Rodinal 1:50. The density I got was about 1.89. So let me spell it out, it was way above what it should be. My second attempt corrected the exposure (more exposure, more density) and halved the development time to 5 minutes. The density I got was now 1.69, which is still way above what it needs to be. My two choices now are to dilute the developer or to use less agitation. If the time is below 5 minutes you will see some variance in results depending on how quickly you stop the development. I’m not done testing yet, and it is going much slower than I’d like because I don’t have but a few minutes at night to do one test.

Film testing is not a fun task, but in many ways I think it is necessary to go through to at least establish your custom times. The goal is to spend less time fighting my negatives to get a reasonable print and more time enjoying the results. The problem I’m running into is a lack of consistency in my negatives or detail in the highlight areas. The negative has it, but the paper can’t reproduce it readily. My scans came out nice but the prints were a lot more contrasty. Now I know why.

After I get my Arista/Foma film development process down, I may experiment with using my Silvergrain Tektol to develop the film. I’ll start with paper strength at 5 minutes and adjust density by adjusting my dilution or time.